I have a lot of gripes about the grammar used (or misused) by reporters. This one even drew Andy Rooney’s ire a few weeks ago:
Troop: A troop is a group of solders, like a company or a division. It is not just one soldier. Therefore it is incorrect to say “Three American troops died today” when what one means is three soldiers, three individuals.
Enough said. The world will little note nor long remember my puny efforts to preserve the English language as I learned it.
Stanley “Tookie” Williams was sentenced to death in 1981 for the murders of four individuals. 1981. That’s twenty-four more years of life, of clemency, than his victims got.
Yes, there’s a definite anti-Bush bias in this blog. It might shed some light to know I was a lifelong registered Republican until Dubya came along. He was the last straw in my growing disenchantment with the Republican Party. I’m not particularly content as a Democrat, either. (Howard Dean as party chairman? What a suicidal move for the party.) Maybe I’ll register Independent before the next election.
I should have known it was too good to be true. That twinge of optimism I felt after President Bush’s speech yesterday was dashed within an hour. It seems his idea of “temporary” (as in “temporary worker”) is up to six years.
No, no, Mr. President. Temporary should be more like two or three months, long enough to harvest one season’s crop. Nothing more. Not long enough to be absorbed permanently (or disappear entirely) into our society and proceed to partake of our educational and health care systems. Immigrants seeking privileges like that can do it legally, via U.S. citizenship, as have generations of immigrants before them.
Illegal means illegal, Mr. Bush. What part of that do you not understand?